The way the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae, manages to perform underwater acrobatics and turn on a dime - despite having pendulous, outsize pectoral fins - has inspired aviation engineers in Göttingen, Germany to make a faster, quieter helicopter rotor blade.

A helicopter has a rotor whose aerofoil-shaped blades provides lift, directional control and forward thrust. As the rotor spins, the advancing blade - which is moving in the same direction as the craft - is travelling faster than the retreating blade on the opposite side. These different speeds make for turbulence, vibration and instability - especially during fast flight and whilst turning, when the retreating blade is more likely to lose lift and "stall". As a result, helicopter engineers spend a lot of time trying to minimise this effect.

Noting the humpback's agility in water, Kai Richter and colleagues at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) wondered if something analagous to the bumps on its pectoral fins - known to provide lift underwater and boost the creature's buoyancy - could help them improve chopper design. Scaling those bumps down relative to a rotor's width, they made 6-millimetre-diameter rubber grommets and fastened 186 of them to the leading edges of the rotors on a test helicopter (see picture, above).

It did indeed significantly delay stalling and the difference has already been noticed by test pilots, Kai says, providing a smoother ride. They have been encouraged enough by their results to file patents on the idea, and they now plan further tests. If their whale mimicry pans out, it won't involve clunky rubber grommets: the bumps would be milled into blades during manufacturing.

Creating the pattern for a new dress design can be fiddly, so Amy Wibowo at the University of Tokyo, Japan, is using augmented reality to make it simpler.

Six ceiling-mounted cameras are trained on the dummy and on two tools held by the designer, one for creating surfaces and other for cutting them. The tools and the dummy both have markers, so the cameras can work out where in 3D space they are relative to each other. As the designer draws and works on and around the physical mannequin, this shows up on a virtual onscreen version.

"The idea is to make it easy for people to design clothes," says Wibowo. Usually you have to choose set patterns, which is limiting, she says. What's particularly difficult is working out what 2D shapes are needed in order to achieve a particular 3D design.

Her approach, called DressUp, gets round this by using "flattening" algorithms to work out the best shaped patterns to achieve the 3D design. Then you just print it out and cut around the patterns in the material of your choice, she says.

Since most people wouldn't have this set up in their homes, Wibowo is now thinking about how she might be able to create something similar using Wii remotes. Wibowo will be presenting the project at the TEI conference in Kingston, Ontario, in February.

Nintendo has announced that the tablet-like controller of its next console, the Wii U, will come equipped with a near-field communications (NFC) chip, opening up the possibility of new kinds of games and new ways to pay for them.

"By installing this functionality, it will become possible to create
cards and figurines that can electronically read and write data via
non-contact NFC and to expand the new play format in the video game
world," said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

A game released last year called Skylanders used NFC technology to bring toy models into its virtual environment, but that required a special hardware add-on - the new controller will allow any game on the Wii U to do the same.

Iwata also suggested the chips could be used to pay for new in-game content via an NFC-enabled phone system, such as the recently launched Google Wallet. "Adoption of this functionality will enable various other
possibilities, such as using it as a means of making micropayments," he said.

The company plans to announce the final details of the Wii U in June at E3, the video game industry's biggest annual gathering, and will release the console later this year.

Signing up to an online service inevitably means entering a password - hopefully a brand new one you've just randomly generated, but more likely the same one you use on every single website, even though you know you're not supposed to.

Most sign-up forms these days use password strength checkers in an effort to beef up security, displaying "weak", "medium" or "strong" depending on how easy it is to crack your password, but it turns out these can actually be misleading - "Password1" is stronger than "password", but is still easily guessed by an attacker because it is so widely used.

That is why researchers at INRIA in Rocquencourt, France and Ruhr University Bochum in Germany have come up with a more advanced strength checker that rates passwords relative to those already stored in a site's database. Rather than vague strength messages, their system can tell users their password is amongst the weakest 5 per cent on the site, encouraging them to try again with a stronger alternative.

UPDATE: The FBI refused to answer specific questions from New Scientist, but did provide a statement on the scope and legality of the software it wishes to build:

"The intent is to view publicly available open source, non-private social data that is readily available on the open internet. The application will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to "events" and "crisis," and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security. Examples of these words will include lockdown, bomb, suspicious package, white powder, active shoot, school lock down, etc.

The FBI uses publicly available open source information to identify immediate or emerging threats to national security or violations of federal criminal laws, to provide situational awareness and to establish a common operating picture.
The type of social media application being researched by the FBI, to view publicly available information, is no different than applications used by other government agencies.

The FBI's Privacy and Civil Liberties Unit will review the legal implications of the application and ensure that we meet all privacy requirements prior to the application being implemented."

(Image: Patrick George/Ikon Images/Getty)

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.

The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February.

The bureau's wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search "publicly available" material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of "breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats".

A wake of vultures scavenge an animal carcass: what do they do to people?

Ever entertained the idea of leaving your body to science? Even if you have, you can scarcely have considered the strange fate of one donated corpse that has just been revealed in the journal Forensic Science International: a donor's body was left in a Texan wilderness so that vultures could scavenge and "skeletonise" it - and distribute the remains far and wide.

The MakerBot Replicator is the kind of personal 3D printer that could help with the Pirate Bay's plans (Image: MakerBot Industries)

The Pirate Bay, one of the internet's most well-known sites for downloading copyrighted material such as music, films and ebooks, has launched a new category of digital downloads: physical objects.

Writing on the site's blog, a Pirate Bayer calling himself WinstonQ2038 explained the thinking behind the new category: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form
into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to
call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical."

You'll need a 3D printer to take advantage of the files on offer, meaning it is not quite as simple as downloading an MP3, but the move opens up the possibility of intellectual property infringement for physical objects.

Want to show that must-see video to your friends, but don't want to crowd around a tiny screen? Or perhaps you have an important document on your handset to share during a large meeting. You could try a phone with a built-in projector, but wouldn't it be easier to use your regular device? Now you can, thanks to "virtual projection", a system for sharing your screen on to any nearby display.

It works like this: when you hold your phone up to the screen of a computer running the virtual projection software, the phone's camera constantly captures and compares images from the screen to work out its location. This information is passed back to the computer via Wi-Fi to place the virtual projection in the right place on the screen.

Moving the phone will rotate and distort the image just like a regular optical projector, but it is also possible to turn this off, giving you a stable image even if you move and allowing you to put the phone down. Multiple users can also place images on the same screen, allowing them to work together.

Researchers at the University of Bristol, UK dissolved iron particles in water that contained chlorine and bromine ions, materials which are commonly found in household products such as mouthwash or fabric cleaner. This created a metallic centre within the soap particles that could be influenced by a nearby magnetic field.

The team tried out their new soap by placing it in a test tube beneath layers of water and an oil-like substance. Using a magnet, they were able to overcome both gravity and surface tension to lift the soap through the layers and out of the tube.

This test shows that it is much easier to remove magnetic soaps from mixtures of other liquids, suggesting they could be used in response to environmental disasters such as oil spills, where concerns have been raised about the cleaning substances in use. A magnetic soap could easily be collected after cleaning, reducing the environmental impact.

Magnetic soaps could also have a range of industrial applications thanks to their ability to change properties such as electrical conductivity or melting point at will with a magnetic on/off switch. These properties are normally altered by adding an electric charge or changing the pH, temperature or pressure of the substance, meaning they can not be reversed.

Stand down those GPS jammers, Americans. The justices of the US Supreme Court have ruled that the police will indeed continue to need a search warrant to install a GPS tracker on a suspect's car. The decision means police cannot treat GPS tracking as a simple extension of "tailing" someone, which does not require a warrant.

The justices had been asked to consider dropping the need for a search warrant by the US Department of Justice after a nightclub owner had a life jail term quashed by a lower court. The latter did so on the grounds that a location tracking device - which gathered data on the suspect's whereabouts crucial to his conviction - had been illegally acquired. Although a warrant had initially been issued for the tracking, it had expired - and the DoJ decided to fight the need for one, saying GPS beacons are latterday crime-fighting tools the law simply needs to catch up with.

The argument did not sit well with the justices - some described GPS tracking as Orwellian, worrying that even Supreme Court justices could be unknowingly tailed. "The government's attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment," the justices ruled today. The Fourth Amendment protects US citizens' homes against unreasonable search and seizure by the state.

"A majority of the Court acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store and analyse an enormous amount of information about our private lives," says ACLU legal director Steven Shapiro. "Today's decision suggests that the court is prepared to address that problem."

When the case was heard last November, Twitter was awash in chatter about illegal GPS jammers and how they could foil warrantless tracking. Hopefully that has now been stayed - as widespread jammer use could ruin GPS reception, not only for satnavs but also for cellphone networks which use the GPS satellite network's over-the-air atomic clock signals for timing purposes.

The privacy lobby's attention now swings to Congress, where the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillence Act (GPS Act) is pending discussion in both the Senate and the House. ACLU hopes the precedent set by the Supreme Court will similarly prevent cellphone-derived location data being seized by law enforcement without a warrant.

People who complain about some of the racier content on YouTube are often told that the sheer rate at which that content is uploaded makes it impossible to moderate. That claim would seem to be more than borne out by the figures released by Google, YouTube's owner, today.

The search giant's figures show that one hour of video is now being uploaded to Youtube every single second of the day. That upload rate - equivalent to 60 hours per minute - is an astonishing tenfold increase from its 2007 video upload rate.

And some 30 per cent of its growth has come in the last eight months, says Google. Just for fun, they've posted an animation called onehourpersecond.com to show you just what happens in a Youtube-upload-second - and multiples thereof.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) today ordered detailed inspections on the wings of the Airbus A380 jumbo jet after cracks were found in aluminium alloy brackets that secure the wing's skin to the aircraft. "This condition, if not detected and corrected, could potentially affect the structural integrity of the aeroplane," the safety watchdog warns.

EASA says two types of cracks have been found in the L-shaped brackets, called rib feet, that join the A380's wing surface, which is also made of an aluminium alloy, to the ribs whose profile defines the wing's cross sectional shape. The first type of rib foot crack was found when the aircraft damaged in last November's A380 engine-loss incident was being checked out after repairs.

But after subsequent checking of more of the fleet, engineers found a "more significant" form of cracking has developed on the rib feet of some of the aircraft. So EASA has ordered "detailed visual inspections" within the next six weeks for A380 aircraft that have flown between 1300 and 1799 takeoffs and landings - and within just four days for those with over 1800 flight cycles.

There's a good reason safety watchdogs take no chances with even the smallest of cracks: it was cracks caused by the then unknown phenomenon of metal fatigue that caused the fatal midflight breakups of the De Havilland Comet, the first world's pressurised, aluminium-skinned jetliner, in the 1950s. Tiny cracks around window portholes eventually propagated, bursting the fuselage, after a certain number of flight pressurisations and depressurisations.

While EASA has not said what might happen if A380 rib feet fail owing to cracking, if a section of wing skin were to separate from the plane the debris could potentially damage any critical structure it collides with - like the tailfin.

Fast-moving birds like goshawks can zip through dense forests by intuitively avoiding the trees, but researchers at MIT have discovered a theoretical speed limit over which they are guaranteed to crash. The findings could help build more efficient unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by designing them to mimic bird flight paths.

UAVs are currently designed to fly at relatively slow speeds, allowing them to come to a halt before reaching the edge of their field of view. You might think that adding more sensors would allow them to fly faster, but MIT aerospace engineer Emilio Frazzoli says otherwise.

Frazzoli and colleagues created a mathematical model that shows a bird or drone flying through a built-up environment of a given density will always crash once it reaches a certain speed, no matter how much it knows about its surroundings.

Sick of having to ditch your bottled water, booze and toiletries at the airport security post? That appalling hassle should end by April next year, when airports are supposed to start screening the contents of bottles for explosives.

But they can only do this if the bottle-scanning technologies currently being trialled are up to the job. This week, Cobalt Light Systems of the UK says its explosives detector has passed all its European civil aviation security tests - which means the end should be in sight for bottle-dumping at airport security.

Yesterday's shutdown of the Megaupload file storage website, and the arrest of four of its founders in New Zealand, illustrates how a global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) may be facilitating coordinated multinational clampdowns on alleged digital content piracy.

The move, led by the FBI, comes just a day after huge protests on the internet against SOPA - controversial US legislation designed to stop online piracy.

Megaupload allowed users to upload and store large files to make them easily downloaded by others, without using sophisticated peer-to-peer software. But the FBI alleges it was posting "movies, music, TV programmes, ebooks and business and entertainment software on a massive scale" - allegedly costing copyright owners $500 million in lost sales.

Students groaning under the weight of multiple textbooks can now swap their hefty tomes for an iPad - if they can afford one. Apple today launched a new range of interactive textbooks specifically designed for its tablets.

iBook Textbooks dump the paper-flipping effect of ebooks for a more app-like experience, offering images, videos and interactive diagrams alongside the text. Students can also highlight passages and make notes, then touch a button to have them transformed into study cards.

Wikipedia went down, denying access to the 85 million people who visit the site every day. Flickr users chose to black out over 200,000 photos. Reddit, a news aggregator that is an important source of traffic for many media sites, was out of action. Wired censored its own headlines and BoingBoing, a popular tech culture blog, censored its entire site. So, did yesterday's black-out have any effect?

For the benefit of those who missed the furore, which at one point was the subject of 4,500 tweets per minute, the black-outs were protests against two copyright bills - dubbed SOPA and PIPA - that are making their way through Congress. The bills would give copyright holders greater power to take down content deemed to be infringing, and so are liked by Hollywood and big music companies.

The protests seem to have been effective. Several Republican supporters of the legislation, most notably potential vice-presidential pick Marco Rubio, withdrew their backing. Since the White House had already signalled its dislike of the bills, supporters of SOPA and PIPA will probably have to substantially rewrite their proposals, or kill them altogether.

The Wikipedia protest against US anti-piracy laws is in full swing, with the site blacked out until 5 am GMT on 19 January. But while millions are realising they might have to reach for those dusty Encarta DVDs, those in the know can still access the web's favourite encyclopaedia. Here are our top five ways to get your Wiki fix.

Mobile

While those visiting Wikipedia on their desktop or laptop will see a black page (pictured above), mobile users can access the site as normal. That means you can also view the mobile site on your regular PC - just point your browser at http://m.wikipedia.org/ for full access, albeit in shrunk-down form. Wikipedia says this was done intentionally, to allow access "during an emergency".

Apps

A Wikipedia app for your phone is normally an optional extra for those who don't like using the mobile site. But apps for the Apple or Android smartphones and tablets also avoid the blackout, since they should work as normal. Some apps even download Wikipedia content to read offline, which makes them immune to any future downtime.

Wikipedia, the sixth-most visited website on the internet, is planning a major shutdown to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), two proposed laws aimed at halting online piracy that critics say could seriously harm the internet.

From 5am GMT tomorrow, the English language version of the online encyclopaedia will be replaced by a single black page asking visitors to contact US politicians and express their opposition to the proposed laws. The decision to shutdown the site was reached in typical Wikipedia fashion, with users discussing the pros and cons before eventually agreeing to go ahead with the protest.

The community rushed to reach a consensus so that the protest could coincide with other website blackouts, including social news site Reddit and news blog Boing Boing, set for 18 January, the same day as a planned SOPA hearing in the US Congress.

That hearing has now been postponed following criticism of the legislation from the White House, but Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the protest will still go ahead. "Unclear that SOPA is really dead, but messaging will target the reality on the ground on Wednesday," he said on Twitter, later adding that PIPA, which is still due to be debated by the US Senate, remains "a live threat".

Other websites wanting to join the protest can now use an app created by CloudFlare, the web security service previously used by LulzSec to protect its website from attacks. CloudFlare users can activate the Stop Censorship app to automatically black out words longer than five characters and ask visitors to protest the new laws.

As the Consumer Electronics Show wraps up in Las Vegas, Nevada, many of the 140,000-plus attendees are heading home a few pounds lighter: walking around 158,000 square metres of exhibition space for a week will do that to you.

Still, some may come away wanting to lose even more weight after seeing all of the high-tech bathroom scales at the show. From small vendors to electronics giants such as Samsung, which demonstrated a scale that can beam its results to a television, futuristic weight-watching devices were all over the place.

Tanita Corp., a small Japanese company, showed off a dozen scales ranging in price from $100 to $500. All of them incorporate Wi-Fi and transmit either to smartphone apps or computer software.

The company's higher-end scales are capable of taking up to 25 body measurements - from simple weight to body water and muscle percentages - through metal nodes the user stands on. The nodes transmit electrical signals through the body, which an algorithm uses to approximate measurements. The scales also have retractable handles that can measure arm strength.

"We believe a product like ours is beneficial in helping to achieve [weight-loss] goals because we want people to do it in a healthy way," Keith Erickson, sales manager for Tanita, told New Scientist. "You want to use something like this to tell you if you lost 10 pounds of muscle or 10 pounds of fat or water."

Weight-loss experts are divided on whether such high-tech devices can be effective. Maye Musk, a dietitian in New York, says tracking one's measurements has been found to help with weight loss.

"Any way to stay healthy is good," she says. "Keeping track of one's weight does make one more conscious of eating well and losing weight."

Gabi Rose, a weight-loss adviser in Florida, says scales that simply track weight can be dangerous, but higher-end ones can be useful.

"Our bodies tend to fluctuate daily and this could make us more obsessed with weight," she says. "Our body carries good fat and unhealthy fat and our weight alone is not a good measure of health."

How can curiosity help robots to communicate with humans? That's the question Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, head of the Flowers team at research institution INRIA, in Bordeaux, France, wants to answer - and to do it he is enlisting visitors to an art gallery in central Paris.

Tucked away in an egg-shaped structure at the Fondation Cartier lurk five ergo-robots - skull-faced, chirruping critters programmed with artificial curiosity and language acquisition algorithms designed by Oudeyer and his team. The ergo-robots are also equipped with sensors that allow them to interact with the curious public who have come to peer at them daily since their installation in October.

Satellite broadband has a bit of a bad reputation. It's a view California's ViaSat is hoping to change with two announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.

The first is a new home broadband service, available next week, that boasts download speeds of up to 12 megabits per second at a price tag of $50 per month. The speed is considerably higher than what's typically been available, with most residential satellite services topping out between one and two megabits. The price is also significantly lower, with other services generally costing between $70 and $100.

ViaSat also announced a partnership with JetBlue. The airline will be testing satellite broadband on flights, with an eye to rolling out service in early 2013. It's too early to discuss pricing, says ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg, but simple options such as email and web surfing could be free.

The key to both was the launch of ViaSat 1 in October. The satellite has about 140 gigabits per second of data capacity - dramatically more than the single gigabit previous satellites have had.

The extra capacity means satellite broadband is finally becoming economical to offer and it can now match many of the capabilities of its terrestrial counterparts. At CES, ViaSat was demonstrating the ability to run multiple applications at once, including high-definition video.

An online skirmish between pro- and anti-Israeli hackers has escalated following the death of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, the Iranian nuclear scientist who was killed yesterday in a car explosion.

The attacks began last week when a group of Saudi Arabian hackers called Group-XP published what it claimed were the credit card details of 400,000 Israelis, though the Bank of Israel says only 15,000 people were affected. On Saturday, Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon called the attack "a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation", adding that "Israel has active capabilities for striking at
those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune
from retaliatory action."

Touch control, voice control, gesture control: alternative interfaces - or those that aren't mice and keyboards - are all the rage at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). With electronics gaining ever more computing power, it's understandable that old inputs don't necessarily apply to new gadgets.

And we can now add eye tracking to the list of interfaces that are showing future promise. Sweden's Tobii Technology, for one, is at CES showing off its system on laptops running Windows 8.

How it works is simple - the user looks at an application on screen and taps the computer's touchpad to launch it. The tracking technology is housed in a sensor along the bottom of the screen. Invisible infrared lights illuminate the viewer's eyes, then rapid-action cameras take pictures - about 30 per second - to build a 3D model of them.

For the laundry-impaired geeks of the world, Samsung has found an answer: a washing machine that can tell you when your laundry is done via a smartphone app.

Strange though it may seem - "my wife already does that" was a common response amongst attendees viewing the device when it was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show this week - Samsung is just one of many appliance makers racing to install a host of internet-connected features in machines in an effort to make them "smart."

The washers and dryers, available starting in the spring, connect to any smartphone through a downloadable application. The phone can then be used as a remote control, so the machines can be turned on and off while their owner is at work or on the bus.

Samsung says it's not just a novelty - the app connection actually has some practical uses.

"If you started to dry clothes in the morning and forgot to take them out you can go to your phone and restart your dryer for when you come home, so your clothes are refreshed and ready to go," said spokesperson Amy Schmidt.

The company also says that with electricity rates varying depending on the time of day, more control over when the machines are used can help save money.

Perhaps, but what they will probably really accomplish is what all good technologies do - enable laziness. Rather than getting up to check on whether the laundry is done, users will instead monitor it on their phones while watching TV.

If only Samsung would invent a robot that could then take the laundry out of the machine and fold it. Of course, if the company did, there would surely be similar snide comments about spouses.

And oh yes, in case anyone was wondering - the laundry machines can also connect to Samsung's Twitter-enabled refrigerator. That means users can monitor their wash and tweet, all while grabbing a snack. The future has arrived.

With internet connectivity in just about everything these days, there's almost no situation in which we can't get online and be productive. Apart from the shower, that is. Who wants to get their brand new shiny iPad wet, after all?

That last internet dead zone may not last much longer, however, with the waterproofing of gadgets a major theme at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The first step down the road may be the predictably named iShower from Connecticut-based accessory maker iDevices, which attaches to the shower wall in the bathroom. It can stream music from phones and tablets within a 60-metre range via Bluetooth. Devices are thus safe from water damage. iDevices says its speaker, a new take on the classic shower radio, will be available in March for about $99.

Under Wolfram's scheme, a website like wolfram.com would be accompanied by wolfram.data. A human visitor to wolfram.data would just see a list of publicly available databases, but a computer would be able to access and interact with the data itself.

Of course, this kind of data sharing is already possible thanks to application programming interfaces (APIs), the software instructions published by many web services that allow programmers to combine data in creative ways, such as plotting Twitter updates on a Google map. Each organisation's API is different though, which can make them hard to use. Wolfram's proposal would put data in a standard location and format, making it easier to access.

The world's poorest children could soon have a tablet of their very own, thanks to One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the organisation which aims to bring low-cost computing to the developing world.

OLPC's tablet, dubbed the XO 3.0 and shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, comes equipped with a 20-centimetre touchscreen and runs either Android or Linux software.

The device is designed for outdoor use with a rugged green rubber case and can be powered by a hand-crank, built-in solar panel, or regular power adaptor. Cranking for 6 minutes should produce 2 watts of power, allowing the low-energy tablet to run for an hour. Some models will also be equipped with a Pixel Qi screen, which provides a low-power, e-ink style display that can easily be viewed in bright sunlight.

Now a new study has demonstrated that using Twitter updates and online news websites to track a disease outbreak is not only quicker than more traditional methods - it's just as reliable, too.

In a study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers studied the progression of a cholera epidemic in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010.

There's nothing like the visceral roar of the crowd - that hair-raising, spine-tingling moment when thousands of people all sing, or shout, in unison.

But translating that unique feeling to an event that is taking place online is tricky. Now a new project at MIT's Media Lab aims to give online gamers something to shout about.

Roar, developed by PhD student Drew Harry at MIT's Media Lab, works much like any other chat software, such as Google Chat or the in-game chat clients in role-playing video games. Users can write messages to fellow gamers which appear at the bottom left of the screen and are visible to all. Roar also lets users group messages by 'section', which could be subject matter or region, whatever the users want.

In the end, it looks like it will be the military that is going to scupper the deal.

The neverending saga of LightSquared's attempts to set up a 4G broadband service in the 35-megahertz band adjacent to the one used by GPS satellites may finally be nearing its endgame.

A clause buried deep in the 565 pages of the 2012 Defense Authorization act passed in December bars the Federal Communications Commission from approving systems that interfere in any way with military GPS. The bill also tells the FCC to supply Congress with a final copy of the report from its working group, which late last year issued a preliminary report warning that a system proposed by telecoms firm LightSquared of Reston, Virginia would cause serious interference.

Ever tripped on a staircase or walked into a street lamp while eagerly checking your texts/tweets/emails on your cellphone? If so, you're not alone: a Finnish study has looked at how mobile phones distract us while we are at work or at play. It's a novel study because to date most research has focussed on the distraction risk mobile phones pose to drivers, generally citing a fourfold increase in crash risk to motorists yakking away on their phones.

It has served couch potatoes faithfully for decades but the humble remote control will come under attack at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Flat panels that incorporate motion and voice-recognition controls similar to the Kinect system for Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console are expected to be a big theme at this year's CES, which kicks off this evening.

"I fully expect to see other companies incorporating motion control," said Shawn Dubravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, the event organiser. "You're going to see motion control integrated into these devices like never before, so you'll be able to control your television with a wave of your hand."

Interface experts believe there is an opportunity to displace traditional remote controls, which were bewildering for users even before internet capabilities were introduced.

"When you have thousands of channels and thousands of options, the interface is a lot harder than it used to be," said Robert Jacob, professor of computer science at Tufts University. "Just for watching TV, interfaces have gotten too complicated."

Security software firm Symantec has confirmed that an Indian hacking group has gained access to the source code of the company's popular Norton Antivirus software, though it says the code relates to an older version of the software and cannot be put to malicious use.

Yesterday, a group called The Lords of Dharmaraja posted a document on Pastebin (now removed, but available from Google's cache) that it claimed contained confidential information relating to the Norton Antivirus source code. Norton Antivirus is one of the world's most popular antivirus software
packages, relied upon by millions of computer users
worldwide.

Symantec had originally dismissed the claims, saying the document actually contained publicly available information about their software dating from 1999. But later, a hacker known as Yama Tough provided security site Infosec Island with files that appeared to contain source code from the 2006 version of Norton Antivirus.

The site passed the code on to Symantec, who then confirmed in a statement that it was genuine. "Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code used in two of our older enterprise products has been accessed, one of which has been discontinued," says the company, adding that this had no effect on the consumer versions of its products.

Symantec also says that the source code was not lifted from its own network, but from a yet unconfirmed third party. In their Pastebin release, The Lords of Dharmaraja claim they took the files from Indian military intelligence servers.

Apple has worked out a way in which the power cords for computers or smartphones can help people recover their forgotten login passwords - or the answers to secret questions (like "what was the name of your first pet?") that are often used to recover them. But crucially, Apple's system does this in a way that's designed to prevent anybody who steals the laptop or smartphone from recovering the password.

The technology is predicated on the fact that when you lose a laptop, or have it stolen, you don't tend to lose the power adapter as well. So it makes the power adapter a critical part of the recovery routine for forgotten passwords.

In US patent filing 2012/0005747 Apple proposes a power adapter whose transformer unit has a small memory module built into it. This stores either an encrypted password (or recovery question) whose key is stored on the laptop or smartphone. This way only the correct computer or phone can access the recovery data. For added security, part of the encrypted password could reside on a network server, too.

There's a clear need for this, says Apple: "If the password is not easily and conveniently recoverable, the consumer is likely to choose either not to use a password at all or to use a trivial password. Both choices increase the threat of data loss," it says in the patent.

Of course, once the bad guys know the adapter is important, they'll steal that too if it's available - but Apple suggests further security can be added by storing some of the password recovery data in other (not generally mobile) peripherals, like printers and Wi-Fi routers, too.

Japanese defence engineers claim to have developed a computer virus that can be launched online to track down and disable the source of a cyber attack. If true - and many experts are deeply sceptical - it will mean that they have solved one of the major problems dogging the online security arena: the so-called "source attribution problem".

Attackers launching viruses or denial of service attacks can do so by using cascades of proxy servers (or a botnet) to spoof their source internet address. This means locating the origin of the attack is an utterly dastardly problem, with the source often obfuscated in a thicket of servers in countries beyond effective regulation. But in a three-year-project for Japan's Ministry of Defense the tech contractor Fujitsu has reportedly not only worked out how to solve this attribution problem but also how to destroy the attacking code it meets en route.

The Yomiuri Shimbun says "the virtual cyberweapon" has passed closed network tests in which it jumped between attacking computers, reached the origin of the attack and sent back ID information to its controllers. And all the while cleaning the servers of the attacking code.

Citizens of the Republic of Belarus who visit websites hosted in other countries could soon face fines of up to $125 thanks to onerous legislation that comes into force on 6 January. While the new law aims to ensure
all e-commerce takes place within the virtual borders of the landlocked East European nation, its effects are likely to go far wider.

The US Library of Congress's Global Legal Monitor says the new law will mean Belarusian companies, plus individuals registered as entrepreneurs, may only use domestic .by domains for providing online e-commerce services, conducting sales or sending emails.

The new law also affects internet cafe owners, who could be fined and have their businesses closed down if their customers are found visiting websites outside Belarus. But this could even apply to private individuals who let other people use their computer to browse foreign websites.

Even companies outside Belarus could fall foul of the new law. For example, Amazon is not registered in Belarus, so the republic's attorney general could potentially sue it for violating national law if it sells products to people in Belarus. As such, companies outside Belarus are likely to close their doors to the country to avoid legal hassles.

Such draconian measures are perhaps to be expected from Belarus, described as ""the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe" by former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The country has been ruled by president Alexander Lukashenko since 1994 and is listed as a "country under surveillance" for internet censorship by Reporters Without Borders.